That’s the trailer for the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The expansion continues the story from last year’s Knights of the Fallen Empire. There’s even a call-back to the older trailer in this one with the training arena. The trailers for Star Wars: The Old Republic have consistently leaned into the strength of its story, a curious tactic for an MMO, but one that works. I have no idea who these people are, but I want to see what happens next.
The Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion will be available for subscribers on December 2nd.
It’s May 4th and because Cinco de Mayo is claimed by all the cool kids, nerds had to make up a new internet holiday centered around Star Wars. “May the fourth be with you!” Har har. In turn, that means any Star Wars licensed property is obligated to do stuff today to please the fans. Take Star Wars: The Old Republic. Disney’s new saga continuity may have retroactively negated the canon status of the MMO, but that won’t stop BioWare from promoting a new Epic Story XP Boost today. Subscribers to the MMO will get a multiplier to their experience that is designed to take them all the way through their class story quests and will remain active into this Fall. Along with the XP increase, subscribers will get additional quality of life improvements like unlocked planetary taxi destinations, quicker quick travel cooldowns, and emergency travel passes will be available earlier.
As you can see, the Epic Story XP Boost not only brings a huge boost to the experience you gain from Class Missions, it provides big improvements to how you travel around the Galaxy. With great quality of life improvements to both travel and staying geared while leveling, the Epic Story XP Boost is the best time ever to play through all of our great Class stories.
The dark side is quicker, easier, more seductive, so players that want to do things the harder way can opt out of the XP boost by purchasing a White Acute Module consumable. Star Wars: The Old Republic has been free-to-play since 2012, but does offer a subscription option.
Who can keep Darth Revan’s status straight without a scorecard? As the player character in BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, you could choose to take him down the light or dark side depending on your whims. Rescue the space cat from the tree or kill everyone and steal their belongings? What a quandary! In the 2004 sequel, Revan zipped off to parts unknown to deal with some cosmic tomfoolery and only appeared in the game as a minor distraction, but he continued to pop up in books and comics throughout the years. You can’t keep a good bad guy down. Revan is coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Shadow of Revan expansion features a threat from the sometimes villain and his band of merry fanatics. Along with adding Revan and his gang, the MMO’s level cap is increasing to 60, two worlds are opening up to explorers, and a new Discipline system is replacing the game’s current skill trees.
While Skill Trees appear on the surface to provide flexibility and choice, in practicality they give very little of either. Players of a skill tree all tend to take the same skills in roughly the same order, with only minor variations on which utility choices they pick up by the end of their leveling system. With Disciplines, we can focus on creating strong and fun play styles from level 10 on, without having to worry about how people are spending 50 skill points and whether some people are making bad decisions or if others are finding crazy untested combinations that vastly exceed what we want to happen.
Shadow of Revan launches on December 9th for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
I’m sitting on a bench outside my local MMA gym. My brother just knocked me out in sparring then drove off and now I need my mom to come pick me up. I’m pretty sure all I need now is Michelle DeStefanis – my eighth grade crush – to show up and declare that I’m a loser and I’ll have a new lifetime low.
After twenty minutes, my mom rolls up in her minivan and honks the horn at me, drawing even more attention. I can’t wait until I’m a parent, so I too can have the ability to make an awkward situation even more embarrassing for my child. I don’t turn around to check, but I’m sure the entire gym is now watching as I get in.
“No, not gonna go to class tonight. I’m going to stay home and raid,” I tell Alex.
“Tonight’s not a scheduled raid night,” he says.
“Yeah, I’m going with another guild. They could use someone to try Soa on nightmare with them.”
“Hmm. Okay, I guess. Oh, actually, I’m not going to make Thursday this week. I want to try no-gi and they only do a class on Thursday. Chad is going to give me some one-on-one time.”
“Missing the raid again? And who’s Chad?” I ask.
“Remember that guy who asked us about WoW my first time at the gym? He’s actually pretty cool.”
“Ah. Geez, I haven’t been there in a couple weeks, have I? Hey, that’s kind of funny. It’s like we switched who plays games and who goes to the gym,” I say, turning back to my computer.
Despite my intial reservations about the guy Alex and I have nicknamed “Hot Tamale” (who actually goes by Doom Patrol), he’s turned out to be a great addition to the guild. He has a lot of knowledge about MMO mechanics, is familiar with all the SWTOR classes, and is willing to jump into some of the toughest situations without any of us asking him. For example, the fourth stage of Eternity Vault – one of SWTOR’s two operations – involves a one-on-one duel for every member of the party. There are three possible enemies: one with low HP, one with a considerable amount, and one with a ton. The first time we did it, Tamale immediately volunteered to take one of big dudes. Even more impressive is that he was the second person done with his fight, finishing just seconds after Alex.
He’s been with us for about six weeks now and he’s been a pretty great fit overall. We even considering making him the guild recruiting officer until he started something no GM ever wants: guild drama.
After the jump, trying to avoid a lose-lose resolutionContinue reading →
PvP! It’s a thing. A thing some people are surprisingly passionate about; before my guild chose our server, there was some hot debate on whether we should go Player versus Player or Player versus Environment. Eventually the fear of being constantly killed and corpse camped in open world PvP was too valid an argument, and we decided PvE.
But just because we aren’t throwing down with the other side all the time doesn’t mean we’re deprived of killing us some Imps. This is war, man! Republic (or as I like to say to annoy everyone, Rebellion) versus Empire! Good versus Evil! Freedom versus Oppression! And it’s awesome, when it isn’t being terrible!
After the jump, the high highs and low lows of SWTOR PvPContinue reading →
Every game genre develops its own language and terminology over time. These words make no sense to anyone outside of fans of that genre; your mom isn’t going to know what turtling is, unless she’s one of those cool moms that plays RTS games. Of all the genres I’ve played before though, MMOs seem to have the most exclusive and complicated words and phrases.
Some people have an ear for foreign languages and can pick them up with relative ease. I had a friend in college who spent a summer in Italy – when he came back, he was speaking Italian to my grandmother, an immigrant from there, better than I had ever been able to despite having taken five years of Italian classes. Not surprisingly, I had absolutely no idea what the hell everyone was telling me to do when I started SWTOR.
We’re raiding! Or operating, I guess, as Star Wars: The Old Republic’s end game instances are called operations. So, we’re operating! And it’s great!
Every aspect of it is satisfying for me: the required teamwork, the pressure not to let the group down, the elation when the boss is reduced to zero health, the sense of camaraderie between my fellow operators and myself. I even enjoy when we wipe because it leads to group strategizing on how to do a better job. There’s only one thing that I truly hate about operating: the loot.
“So how do we do this?” I ask Alex. We’re driving home from his second MMA class, which was on Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, a cardio intense grappling martial art. It left him pretty exhausted.
“Water,” he demands. “You give me water.”
I hand him the bottle, which he begins draining.
“How do we do what?” he asks in between gulps.
“Find our eighth member for the guild. You said it would be hard?”
“Ha!” he lets out a derisive laugh. “That’s not just hard. That’s impossibllllle!”
I think he was doing Luke, but he still has some water in his mouth and it comes out as “impwossable.”
“We need another DPS,” my brother, Alex, tells me, as he wraps his hands.
We’re at our local mixed martial arts gym. That was the deal we had made – I would help him run his Star Wars: The Old Republic guild, but he had to start taking classes with me. I figured the two would balance out our social lives.
“Which are those again?” I ask, adjusting the straps of my gloves.
“Pretty much everythi- Ow. Am I doing this right?” he holds his left hand out to me.
I take my gloves off and check his hand. He’s wrapping it too tight – I loosen it for him.
“Are you guys talking about World of Warcraft?” some little guy who overheard our conversation asks. When I say little, I mean height wise. His arms do not look little.
“No,” Alex sneers. “We’re talking about Star Wars.”
“You sparring?” the guys asks him. I can sense malice in his voice. “I need a partner.”
“No!” I say, quickly. The last thing I want is for my brother to get his ass kicked at his first
class. Especially by some World of Warcraft player.
